Unique Civ-Specific Great People Names

That would be awesome, GO. Unique era-specific GPple...

An era-specific system has been talked about a lot, but there are (as always!) some problems with it. What do you do for civs like America? Just scale the time period, I suppose, so that Colonial American people would be "ancient", and so on. The actual programming is trivial; it's the sorting of all the names that is hard!

Here's an idea. (I hope I do not end up regretting mentioning this...) For a long time I have been toying with the idea of religion-specific great prophets. It always seemed odd to me to have Moses born in a Hindu city, or Abu Bakr in the Christian holy city. I haven't looked into it much, but creating a new mechanism for naming just the prophets does not appear that hard.

Basically, there are two ways to go about it: by city religions, or by national religion. If a city has Hinduism only, then only Hindu prophets will be generated from that city. One with Judaism, Islam, and Taoism would have an equal chance of generating any of those kinds.

The other way is to look at the national religion and work from there, but what if you are running free religion?

The downside to religion-specific naming is that you could still take Moses, a Jewish prophet, and use him to create the Dao Miao, which kind of makes the whole thing moot. This also conflicts with my civ-specific convention, so I'd have to scrap that as far as the prophets go, or be forced to come up with names for all seven religions (plus the eighth - no religion) for every civ! But it would still make for an interesting and more flavorful game nonetheless.

So many ideas, so little time.

Still, as you've suggested it...

The religion specific thing would be awesome!

Of course you are right Gaius, civ-specific and era-specific GP can both be done, but not at the same time unfortunately.

Unique era-specific great people would be a better way of doing it rather than the "Linear ordering system". So I gather that it would work by picking a random name out of a pool for the era you're in? That would be brilliant

Btw, they must still be civ-specific

Yep, that's one way you could do it. I suppose it's just a matter of extending the hash to be sorted by era, then adding a simple check to see what era you are in and drawing out a name accordingly.

For example, the American general list would look something like:

Gaius Octavius said:

Yep, that's one way you could do it. I suppose it's just a matter of extending the hash to be sorted by era, then adding a simple check to see what era you are in and drawing out a name accordingly.

For example, the American general list would look something like:

Code:

"GG" :
{
    "Ancient" : ("Ethan Allen", "John Paul Jones", "Daniel Morgan"),
    "Classical" : ("Sam Houston", "Winfield Scott", "Robert E. Lee"),
    "Medieval" : ("Eddie Rickenbacher", "Alvin C. York", "Theodore Roosevelt"),
...
}

Click to expand...

Excellent! Although a lot of that didn't make sense to me it sounds good Of course there'll be a few more than that in each pool?

I suppose that's the only thing you can do with America without borrowing units from other civs pools (eg. medieval english, ancient gauls etc.). What are you doing for other civs that haven't been around since ancient/classical times?

Anyways I'm looking forward to implementing this in my mod!

Well, hold on there, Maverick; I said it wouldn't be hard to code. Sorting through 3,000 names and arranging them chronologically, however, is quite another story!

In another words, if somebody out there is really desperate enough to do that, then I'd be happy to do the coding straightaway. But I don't think that person's going to be me any time soon.

Or, in the words of Civ 2, "All of our great minds are too busy working on our glorious project, WWII in the Pacific. Perhaps we should speak again later."

Well I suppose I could do that send me the current list.

It'll take me a while to do it though because I've got a lot of other stuffs going on at the moment

The list is in the download. It's in one of the Python files.

Thanks got it!

Edit: Just a quick question, what years should be the cutoff points for the eras? (I mean like the industrial era should end about 1950) and what eras are there? The ones I can think of are -

Ancient
Classical
Medieval
Renaissance
Industrial
Modern

I don't think I'm missing any but I could be confused with the civ3 eras...

Years are hard to say, since you'd have to scale it by civ. Ancient America would be around 1607 - 1750, whereas for Rome it would be 4000 BC - 500 BC.

Roughly, I'd say:

Ancient: 4000 to 500 BC
Classical: 500 BC to 500 AD
Medieval: 500 AD to 1450 AD
Renaissance: 1450 to 1800
Industrial: 1800 to 1900
Modern: 1900 to 2000
Future: 2000 onward

Gaius Octavius said:

Years are hard to say, since you'd have to scale it by civ. Ancient America would be around 1607 - 1750, whereas for Rome it would be 4000 BC - 500 BC.

Roughly, I'd say:

Ancient: 4000 to 500 BC
Classical: 500 BC to 500 AD
Medieval: 500 AD to 1450 AD
Renaissance: 1450 to 1800
Industrial: 1800 to 1900
Modern: 1900 to 2000
Future: 2000 onward

Click to expand...

Roughly is good (I was thinking about WW1-2 industrial btw)

Well, remember that Radio and certain other techs (like Flight) trigger the Modern Age, and historically both were invented around 1900.

A question, but why is Nicolas Copernicus a german? I understand how Marie Currie is a french GS but still...

Maybe you should create a list of GP's for people who don't belong to any nation in the game that become available when you run out of names for the GP???

Because Poland is not, and will likely never be, included in Civ. Thus you got to go with the nearest civ, and since Poland was in the domain of Prussia at the time... Hmm... now that I think about it, maybe he should be a Holy Roman scientist?

Somehow I get the feeling that the Wikipedia incident over Copernicus is about to be repeated.

So it's easy to add in new lists for new civs? Because I'm going to add Poland, and remove HRE.

It's in post 179.

Gaius Octavius said:

Tell it to Mexico. I'm waiting for him to release a BtS version of his fix.

Click to expand...

I got impatient and went ahead and updated it. It's here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=6412286&postcount=31

I hope it's not some sort of faux pas to update other people's stuff but I saw that he hadn't been doing anything with it for 6 months.

What's the consensus on the best way to implement this feature? Gaius's Python-based method or the SDK method by frekk? Could anyone elaborate on the merits/drawbacks of the two?

Cheers,
ripple01